They both pulled clean T-shirts from the mesh bags at their feet and shrugged them on. But they hung around. And I could have sworn that every few seconds, my guy still glanced over at me.
“Check out those hotties,” Addison said to me out of the corner of her mouth. I stole a look at her between thumb-flips. She nodded toward the guys. “When this slave driver finally lets us out of camp, run with me over to those boys, so we can stake our claim before the rest of these desperate females.”
Hanging out with Addison was always dramatic. I considered myself to be an intelligent, reasonable person who had seen more than my share of teen girl hysteria, because of her.
“Normally, if I saw strangers staring at me, I would run right over and introduce myself,” I said. “But I’m not convinced they’re staring at me. They could be watching any of these girls.”
“They’re not staring at you,” Addison said. “They’re staring at me.” Her thumb-flips grew larger like she was trying to get the boys’ attention. I moved away from her so I wouldn’t get hit. On my other side, some football equipment on the sidelines was in my airspace—a sled with man-shaped pads that linebackers pushed down the field. I edged back toward Addison.
“If these boys want to stare at me,” she went on, “I’m there.” On there she spun an extra-hard thumb-flip—so hard that it flew straight at me and dinged me on the nose. The blond guy pointed and laughed. My guy took a step forward, almost as if the baton strike were life-threatening and he was going to run to my aid.
The tip of the baton was made of rubber, so it didn’t hurt too much at first. But in the next split second, the shock hit me. I dropped my baton, covered my nose with both hands, and aarghed at the pain.
I used to have the cutest little nose. Then, one day when I was eleven, I was driving a go-cart around my mom’s yard with Addison in the passenger seat. Addison decided it was her turn to drive, jerked the steering wheel out of my hands, and ran us into a tree. The steering wheel broke my nose. When the swelling went down, I had a bump. My mom offered to get me plastic surgery this summer to fix it—“You will look so much better, and feel better about yourself, you’ll see”—but no way was I going under a knife just for looks.
At least, that’s what I’d thought until I pictured what I must look like with a new red bump from Addison’s baton on top of my already prominent schnoz. There went any chance I’d had of capitalizing on my guy’s interest in me.
I tried to resign myself to this and concentrate on making the pain go away. Ever since Addison had broken my nose, when I got hit there, it was like getting hit on my funny bone, a deep inescapable pain so bad it almost tickled. Pesky anger at her remained. But she didn’t always mess things up for me and boys, did she? No, because I had never had any “things” with boys before. She only had a habit of embarrassing me in front of guys who mattered to me, whether I mattered to them or not.
“All right, ladies!” the instructor called. The other girls stopped twirling and gathered around her to hear her last few tidbits of wisdom while I stood behind them, clutching my nose, wishing the pain would suddenly clear so I could smile over at the boys like it was no harm, no foul. The pain would not relent.
There was a rush around me as we were released from camp. “Here,” Addison said, pulling one of my hands free from my nose and thrusting something into it, which felt like my baton bag with all three batons inside. Then I was being dragged across the grass by my elbow, which of course was attached to my arm, attached to my hand, pressed desperately to my throbbing nose. She was dragging me over to those boys anyway.
“Really?” I asked. My voice came out extra nasally.
“Really,” Addison said. “And if you can’t say anything non-snarky, please say nothing at all.” We reached the sideline, and she let go of my elbow. “I saw you staring,” she told the boys. “You boys like what you see?”
“She is completely serious,” I explained to them with my hand still to my nose.
Both boys laughed. My guy asked me, “Are you okay?”
He was tall and paler than most of the football players we’d seen who’d been frying in the sun all summer. His deep black hair had resisted any reddish sun streaks and fell into his eyes. A perfect combination of sinewy body and delicate features, he looked like the lead singer for a Japanese pop band. Everybody at my school thought these bands were cool and had posters of them in their lockers, though nobody actually listened to their music because hello, their lyrics were in Japanese. In short, I had wondered from a distance whether this boy was hot, and he was.
I had given up on attracting him, though. Now it was only a matter of waiting until Addison was through throwing herself at these boys so we could go home. I would have preferred to make my way home on the MARTA subway by myself, clutching what was left of my face and my dignity. But Addison’s mom would be horrified, and I would get in trouble with my mom if I left Addison to fend for herself in downtown Atlanta, even though Addison was six months older than me and had never missed a chance to remind me of this and boss me around when we were younger.
“I’ll be okay in a minute,” I mumbled. Still squinting against the pain, I released my nose, felt around for the metal bench that I’d noticed earlier, and sat down. I waved at them dismissively. “Y’all don’t mind me. Flirt away.”
Addison grilled the guys. “Who were you really watching?”
My guy laughed as the blond one exclaimed, “You!” He was cute too, but big enough to look dangerous. He stood with his muscular arms crossed like he was uncomfortable, protecting his tender feelings.
“Out of all those girls?” Addison asked, tilting her head so that her long blond hair curved down around her boob on one side, and—oh my God, was she pointing both toes in like a two-year-old? Yes, she was. “You’re just saying you were watching me because I’m the one who came over here.” The first intelligent words she’d uttered.
“Nooooo,” said my guy. “We were watching you and your friend here. We were fascinated by that flippy thing you do with your baton.”
“This?” Addison asked.
I deduced from the whirring noise that she was demonstrating her skills for them again. For safety, I slid farther away from her on the bench, then gingerly touched my nose. It would stay on. I dabbed my fingertips under my eyes to make sure my mascara hadn’t run when I teared up. I wasn’t wearing foundation because I would just sweat it off in the summer heat, but I was wearing heavy eye makeup, as always, to go with the purple streaks in my hair. If you were going to have purple hair, it didn’t seem right to dress down.